The timing surrounding the now notorious emails of The Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier were obviously in an effort to instigate an eleventh hour smear campaign against the current Best Picture front-runner. Whether you think the penalty against Chartier was too much or too little is besides the point, this stuff goes on all the time and he just happened to get called out and with the advent of the Internet the mouthpiece to disseminate such information was simply on a much grander level. However, the timing on this newest development is just as intriguing.

Jody Simon, an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, was quoted by WRAL regarding the matter and said, "Soldiers don't have privacy. The military embedded [Boal] so they gave the reporter permission to observe what was going on. ... Works of fiction always have elements of fact."